Elizabeth Holmes says Theranos doesn't need more money

JP Yim/Getty Elizabeth Holmes says that Theranos is having no trouble with expansion plans or funding right now.

Holmes took to the stage at the Fortune Global Forum in San Francisco and defended the company she founded, which has come under fire after a Wall Street Journal in early October raised questions about the company's science.

The startup is "not in a position where we need to raise capital," Holmes said.

Holmes also said it is still in talks with Walgreens, the drugstore chain that installed a series of Theranos wellness centers in Arizona, despite reports that Walgreens will stop rolling it out in new locations.

"They haven't said it to us. We're talking with them and we were at point where we had completed our rollout in Phoenix," Holmes said.

Holmes' appearance at the Fortune Global Forum follows a month of intense scrutiny of her $9 billion startup.

Meanwhile, medical specialists have been calling for peer review of the startup's data.

"I think right now we want to try to lead in transparency. I made a call that if we would be the first lab with the confidence to submit our tests directly to the FDA, that would be the way to get the data out," Holmes said, taking claim for the decision to scale to one test. "But there's no reason why we can't do peer review. And there's no reason we can't publish other stats. And we're going to do that."

On-stage, Holmes said she's spent the past weeks meticulously looking at media coverage and realizing that most of it has not been accurate. It was a problem in communication, she said — despite objections from Fortune's Alan Murray that she was a great communicator to begin with.

"What we've seen in this is that we've never talked about the technology and operations on the back end because we were so focused on our intellectual property," Holmes said. "What we want to do now is introduce that to the world so people can see what we built."